DeepSeek - A Feast of Words in Time of Plague
There are misconceptions we cherish like a protective cocoon. The sweetest and most naive among them is the belief in the inexorable progress of the human spirit. Writer and researcher Natalya Gromova, in her diary reflections, formulates this with painful precision: "It was naive to think that the world was moving forward, albeit with pauses. From wars, violence, murders — towards the understanding that life is given for something else. This is my biggest delusion, which I have been painfully letting go of in recent years." Parting with this illusion is like a second, agonizing loss of innocence. The world is not just standing still; it is falling into a chronological pit, and the smells emanating from that pit are all too familiar.
Then, almost a hundred years ago, José Ortega y Gasset saw the revolt of the masses. Today, as Gromova notes, "The 'Revolt of the Masses,' which Ortega y Gasset wrote back in 1930, is unfolding before us again and promises no upward movement, but throws us back somewhere into the 30s and 40s of the 20th century." This is a revolt of the horizontal that abolishes the vertical. The philosopher gives a precise definition: "The mass is everyone who neither in good nor in evil measures themselves by a special standard, but feels the same as everyone else, and is not only not distressed but pleased by their own indistinguishability." And he adds: "The minority are individuals or groups of individuals who are distinguished by special qualities. The mass are those who are distinguished by nothing."
The danger is not that the mass exists, but that it has stopped wanting to be "average" and has decided to become the measure of all things. "Mediocre minds, under no illusion about their own mediocrity, fearlessly assert their right to it and impose it on everyone, everywhere." In the past, mediocrity at least felt some shame, trying to reach for higher models. Today, the mask is off. Mediocrity is aggressive in its emptiness. "The mass refuses to coexist with anyone other than itself." Ortega notes bitterly that the mass-man is "not so much a person as a shell, a mannequin of a person... there is no personal principle in him... therefore he is always pretending to be someone else."
We feel this physically: we have suddenly become alone. The dead—poets, philosophers, the righteous—can no longer help us. Ortega warned: "We feel that we have suddenly become alone, that the dead have died in earnest, forever, and can no longer help us. The traces of spiritual tradition have been erased. All examples, models, standards are useless. All problems, whether in art, science, or politics, we must solve only in the present, without the participation of the past." Gromova echoes this observation, noting that "our time is a spectacle of countless human lives that have lost their way in their own labyrinths, unable to find something to which they can devote themselves." We are trapped in an endless "present" with no map or compass. The mass-man, according to Ortega, is "one who goes with the flow and is defenseless in the face of external circumstances."
But if Ortega described the symptoms, we have lived to see the anatomy of this disease firsthand. At the turn of eras, when old ideals crumbled to dust, a vacuum formed. And into this vacuum rushed those who had always been there, in the shadows—bearers of a primitive but tenacious morality, where might overrides right, and the circle of "us" stands against the rest of the world. The barbarian of our days did not come with a sword from beyond the forest; he emerged from the back alleys. And his main weapon is not so much physical violence, but the word, which he has remolded in his own image. He brought with him a language that quickly became the norm, and a morality that proved to be more cynical, harsher, and therefore more "viable" than outdated ideals.
The poison entered the organism of language earlier than it entered the organism of power. And here we enter a realm explored by many 20th-century thinkers. The German philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jew who miraculously survived Nazi Germany, created the fundamental work "LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii: The Language of the Third Reich." He wrote: "What then is LTI? It is the language of Nazism, but also the language used by its victims, its passive opponents, which they involuntarily absorbed." Klemperer made a discovery that has become classic: totalitarian regimes win not only with tanks, but with words. He showed how, through repetition, through infiltration into everyday speech, through the devaluation of old concepts, language becomes an instrument for the enslavement of consciousness.
Eugen and Ingeburg Seidel, in their work on language changes during the Third Reich, develop this idea: "Dungeons can be hidden behind colorful facades, screams of terror can be drowned out by march melodies, but the barbarian immediately betrays himself as soon as he opens his mouth… Ruins can be cleared away, the consequences of errors corrected, sight restored to the blind. But the poison that enters the organism of language, the habit of emptying words of meaning, of linguistic slovenliness, of lying in the use of words… such poison is not easy to diagnose and even harder to get rid of."
This is the main catastrophe. You can rebuild cities, you can change governments. But when the fabric of language changes—the soul changes. Researchers of totalitarian language from different countries come to the same conclusions: in such eras, language becomes a tool for consolidating the nation in the name of proclaimed "new" values; an open struggle is waged against any manifestations of heterogeneity—dialects, borrowings, anything that disrupts the monolithic structure. Dictionaries are transformed from mere reference books into instruments for educating the "new man." When lofty concepts are used for base purposes, when lies go unnoticed, when speech loses precision and becomes a set of slogans—we cease to be people and turn into that very mass.
The Seidels formulate the most terrible law of total ideology: "The dominant ideology penetrates language, creates terminology and a linguistic style that begin to be used not only by supporters… but also by… opponents of this ideology." Klemperer confirms this with his personal experience: he caught himself, even within his family circle, hating the regime, yet using Nazi turns of phrase. This is the moment of final capitulation. When even protest is formulated in the executioner's words, when no words remain to describe the love of freedom other than the lexicon of prison or barracks—the battle is lost. We breathe this air, we speak this language, without even noticing that our lungs are full of smog and our vocabulary has shrunk to primitive constructions.
Ortega, foreseeing this, wrote: "From a single individual, you can determine whether they are mass or not." The mass-man is recognized by their speech—flat, devoid of irony, filled with clichés, incapable of distinguishing nuances. They speak this way because they think this way: in ready-made blocks, stereotypes, slogans. They lack what the philosopher called "nobility obliges"—the inner demand placed on oneself, even if it is beyond one's strength. The authentic person, unlike the mass-man, is one who "demands much of themselves and takes upon themselves burdens and obligations."
In the twilight of the soul, when the dead have finally died, and the living have lost their way in the labyrinths of their mediocrity, the only thing left is the attempt to bear witness. To notice the poison, to diagnose the illness. Ortega reminded us: "Man, thanks to his capacity to remember, accumulates his own past, possesses it, and benefits from it… Therefore, Nietzsche defined the highest human type as the being 'with the longest memory'." Memory is the antidote. Memory of what words truly mean. Memory that behind every lofty concept lies living experience, blood and tears, not an empty shell.
Today, this burden is both philological and spiritual. It is the duty not to let words become completely devalued. It is the attempt to speak clearly, precisely, and honestly in a world that has forgotten how to hear the truth. It is resistance through language—the only resistance that still makes sense when all other frontiers have been surrendered. To prevent the barbarian from winning completely. If only in the silence of one's own heart.
Based on the diary entries of Natalya Gromova
https://t.me/natalyagromovadnevnik/1777
It was naive to think that the world was moving forward, albeit with pauses. From wars, violence, murders — towards the understanding that life is given for something else. This is my biggest delusion, which I have been painfully letting go of in recent years. The "Revolt of the Masses," which Ortega y Gasset wrote back in 1930, is unfolding before us again and promises no upward movement, but throws us back somewhere into the 30s and 40s of the 20th century.
"...mediocre minds, under no illusion about their own mediocrity, fearlessly assert their right to it and impose it on everyone, everywhere."
"The mass refuses to coexist with anyone other than itself."
"We feel that we have suddenly become alone, that the dead have died in earnest, forever, and can no longer help us. The traces of spiritual tradition have been erased. All examples, models, standards are useless. All problems, whether in art, science, or politics, we must solve only in the present, without the participation of the past."
"Our time is a spectacle of countless human lives that have lost their way in their own labyrinths, unable to find something to which they can devote themselves."
